Music: Moscow Music Congress

Russian composers patriotically hymned Soviet heroes during World War
II, and the good will they thus banked at the Kremlin gave them a brief
period of postwar freedom. But by 1948, an iron hand had closed tightly
around Soviet composers. The hand was that of Andrei Zhdanov, cat-cruel
Politburo careerist whose ear for music had been destroyed long before
by the din of dialectical crossfire. Zhdanov in effect put all Russian
composers on trial, including the three modern giantsSergei
Prokofiev, Dmitry Shostakovich and Aram Khachaturian. The charges:
"formalism" (i.e., art for art's sake,...